Meet the Patels
5 March 2016, evening time
As a brown person whose family talks about marriage and arranged marriages all the time, Meet the Patels was god damn amazing. Ravi Patel is a comedian and an actor. (I saw him most recently in Master of None.) The film is shot by his sister, who he mocks for her terrible cinematography, and features his family heavily. The film opens with Ravi letting you know that he has just ended his relationship with his girlfriend of two years, prior to travelling with his family on a vacation to India. While in India he (eventually) agrees to let them set him up for an arranged marriage. The film then proceeds to walk the audience through all the logistics of getting an arranged marriage in 2015. The film is funny and at times very sweet. It’s refreshing to see arranged marriages presented in a very human way. His parents relationship is probably one of the most positive depictions of an arranged marriage i’ve seen in cinema. (They are also hilarious.) I don’t want to spoil the movie for you, but the film is probably as much about arranged marriages as it is about telling your Brown parents about your secret girlfriend. I found so much of the movie so thoroughly relatable, which might be why I enjoyed it so much. My unmarried cousins will screen calls from relatives or put off going back to Scarborough to avoid talking about why they aren’t married. It’s hilarious to know that from the top of India, in Gujarat, all the way down to Sri Lanka, the conversations and the attitudes around marriage are so similar. I wonder if they’ll do a follow up movie.